Game Won't Start

[Your Mother's A Good Woman]

I'm not sure sure exactly what is wrong. I've re-installed it several times. I've verified the files every time, and every time it says they're valid.

I then launch the game, and nothing happens. I watch the process in the task manager, and I see it slowly build up to about 900,000K, then it suddenly drops to 150,000K, then just vanishes from the process list.

My system is a Win7 64-bit, AMD FX-6300, 16gb ram, GTX 960. It runs most of my demanding games on the highest settings with no problems. I've tried setting compatibility to XP, and still no dice. Nothing seems to work.

Anybody have any clue as to why this is happening? I really want to play this game that I bought over 2 years ago. :S

[Mazrix]

I'm having the same problem occur on Win 10, on a machine that prior to a sudden overnight update (thanks, Microsoft) ran the game perfectly fine on win 8.1.

Researching the issue led me to threads from 2014, where people were having symptomatically identical issues. The game was not creating crash logs, which led one of the devs (Lavamadness) to believe the game was missing third party files. This was fixed by installing XNA game studio (linked by the dev on that thread).

This, however, doesn't really work anymore. The XNA software is ancient in terms of technology (2010), and requires additional programs to even install (Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, or Visual C# 2010). The prerequisites are no longer available for download. Instead the link redirects you to Microsoft Visual Community.

Community is at the most basic form a 6 gigabyte installation, and does not include whatever XNA requires. NOTE: This program was NOT required at all. The XNA link in that previous thread lead to a wild goose chase.

I'd love for a dev to come in here to provide some help. I adore this game (which is why I threw Kerberos 80 bucks for its Indiegogo, still waiting on that Black Section book).

UPDATE:
I've installed pretty much all packages for Visual Studio. XNA refuses to install. Game still won't run.
Downloading the specific XNA 4.0 install package from their website allowed me to install the software (before which I uninstalled the already existing 4.0 from my PC), and the game STILL won't run.

UPDATE 2:
I've basically just been spamming the .net and XNA installation files located in the Pits local files. Uninstalling, reinstalling, several times in a row, testing if the game will work in between.

And after the... 5th try? it suddenly started working.

What can we learn from this? XNA is a terribly fickle piece of crap that doesn't install properly half the time. It needs to die and be replaced by something that works.

[Taidana Kage]

Originally posted by Mazrix:

What can we learn from this? XNA is a terribly fickle piece of crap that doesn't install properly half the time. It needs to die and be replaced by something that works.

This. MS technologies don't work properly even on their own OS.